Caroline Knapp Quotes

The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.

I'm still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I'd like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.

I'm 38 and I'm single and I'm having my most intense and gratifying relationship with a dog. But we all learn about love in different ways, and this way happens to be mine.

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

But then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during that second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us.

For a long time, when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is simple: alcohol makes everything better, until it makes everything worse.

Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something.

It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.

Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing.

A love story. Yes: this is a love story. It's about passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fears, yearning hungers. It's about needs so strong they're crippling. It about saying goodbye to something you can't fathom living without.

Was he smart enough? Introspective enough? Was it just enough to love him, or should I attach myself to someone who seemed farther ahead of me, someone smarter and more ambitious than me, who'd be sure to carry me along into the version of adulthood I thought I should be striving for?

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.

There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things, but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even if it's painful and you're afraid.

The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

I don't think you can get really out of anorexia (or any addiction, for that matter) until you simply have no other choice, until the sense that your back's against the wall grows too strong and too irrefutable, until you are simply in too much pain - too desperate and deeply bored and unhappy - to go on.

Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans--the ability to make you feel valued just by being you--and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I'd let her up onto the bed with me. She'd writhe with joy at that. She'd wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I'd just lie there, and I'd feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I'd hear myself laugh out loud.

Anyone who's ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some undefinable tide has turned forever and you can't go back. You need it; it's a central part of who you are.

Addiction to alcohol is also a neurological phenomenon, the result of a complex set of molecular alterations that take place in the brain when it’s excessively and repeatedly exposed to the drug. The science of addiction is complicated, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward: alcohol appears to wreak havoc on the brain’s natural systems of craving and reward, compromising the functioning of the various neurotransmitters and proteins that create feelings of well-being.

So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature, it may be fathomless, but our will to fill it, our often blind tenacity in the face of it, can be extraordinary.

When you hear nothing about the body, he suggests, you stop listening to it, and feeling it; you stop experiencing it as a worthy, integrated entity.

Insight,” he said, “is almost always a rearrangement of fact.

When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws.

Beneath my own witty, profession facade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt.

Of course, the problem with self-transformation is that after a while, you don't know which version of yourself to believe in, which one is true.

We did not learn how to feel or experience our bodies, how to appreciate our own strengths, how to value or respect or understand the packages we came in. Instead, we learned how to look at them, to pair sexuality with desirability, to measure the worth of our bodies by their capacity to elicit admiration from others.

There’s something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia, that disabuses you of the belief in externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it’s painful and you’re afraid. When you drink, you can’t do that. You can’t make the distinction between getting through painful feelings and getting away from them. All you can do is just sit there, numb and sipping, numb and drunk.

I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved it's special power of deflection, it's ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings. I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feeling of ease and courage it gave me.

Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.

What we want, of course, what lies in the cupboard marked 'important,' is connection, love: If the deepest source of human hunger had a name, that would be it; if the boxes of constraint in which so many women live could be smashed to bits, that would be the tool, the sledgehammer that shatters emptiness and uncovers the hope buried beneath it.

Meg often slept with men she didn't want to sleep with: she didn't know how to say no. More precisely, she didn't know she was allowed to say no.

That was my favorite line: I'll drink less when things get better.

And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart. In the midst of all that, I didn't exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part. Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop.

At heart alcoholism feels like the accumulation of dozens of such connections, dozens of tiny fears and hungers and rages, dozens of experiences and memories that collect in the bottom of your soul, coalescing over many many many drinks into a single liquid solution.

The underlying questions of appetite, after all, are formidable — What would satisfy? How much do you need, and of what? What are the true passions, the real hungers behind the ostensible goals of beauty or slenderness?

hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it’s painful and you’re afraid.

Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind.

Things — identifiable objects, products, goals with clear labels and price tags, men you've known for five minutes — make such a handy repository for hungers, such an easy mask for other desires, and such a ready cure for the feelings of edgy discontent that emerge when other desires are either thwarted or unnamed.

Life had this unmoored quality, full of voids and barely acknowledged yearnings, and if I'd made a list of things I wanted desperately at the time, it would have included the most elusive items. Love with ambivalence. Family members who won't leave. Intimacy that's not scary, that doesn't require a lot of anesthesia.

I think the healing power of dogs has less to do with what they give us than what they bring out in us, with what their presence allows us to feel and experience.

You hide behind the professional persona all day; then you leave the office and hide behind the drink.

You're the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.

In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30,000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they'd rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue of appetite can be for women. This is the primary female striving? The appetite to lose appetite? In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: that the primary, underlying striving among many women at the start of the millennium is the appetite for appetite: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one's true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied.

And it does, at least for a little while. It melts down the pieces of us that hurt or feel distress; it makes room for some other self to emerge, a version that’s new and improved and decidedly less conflicted. And after a while it becomes central to the development of that version, as integral to forward motion as the accelerator on a car. Without the drink you are version A. With the drink, version B. And you can’t get from A to B without the right equipment.

a true alcoholic is someone who’s turned from a cucumber into a pickle; you can try to stop a cucumber from turning into a pickle, but there’s no way you can turn a pickle back into a cucumber.

The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one...that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger—indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it—than it is a monumental distraction from hunger.

Recovering alcoholics often talk about drinking “the way they wanted to” when they were alone, drinking without the feeling of social restraint they might have had at a party or in a restaurant. There’s something almost childlike about the need, and about the language we use to describe it: wanting our bottles, wanting to crawl into that dark room in our minds and curl up and be alone with our object of security.

Noting that adolescence is the time in a girl’s life when she realizes that men have all the power and that hers can come only from consenting to become a submissive, adored object, she wrote: “Girls stop being and stop seeing.

I’d go to a party and promise Michael I wouldn’t drink too much. He’d plead: “Just take it easy, okay? Watch yourself,” and I’d swear: “I won’t. I don’t want to get too drunk.” I’d mean that, of course, and I’d start out by measuring myself: one glass of wine the first half hour, one glass the second, and so on. But then something would snap, some uncontrollable process would kick in, and all of a sudden it would be two or three hours later and I’d be on my sixth or tenth or God knows what glass of wine, and I’d be plastered. I couldn’t account for it, couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even rationalize it, although I struggled mightily to. I seemed to get drunk, blind drunk, against my will.

Being known. This, of course, is the goal, the agenda so carefully hidden it may be unknown even to the self. The cutter cuts to make the pain at her center visible. The anorexic starves to make manifest her hunger and vulnerability. The extremes announce, This is who I am, this is what I feel, this is what happens when I don't get what I need. In quadraphonic sound, they give voice to the most central human hunger, which is the desire to be recognized, to be known and loved because of, and in spite of, who you are; they give voice to the sorrow that takes root when that hunger is unsatisfied.

Over the years I’ve come to think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they’ve found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn’t available, if there’s no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.

In between, for five or ten minutes at a stretch, the real version, tense and dishonest and uncertain. I rarely allowed her to emerge for long. Work—all that productive, effective, focused work—kept her distracted and submerged all day. And drink—anesthetizing and constant—kept her too numb to feel at night.

As a journalist in Providence, I was particularly drawn toward stories about women's issues: I wrote about discrimination, abortion, violence against women. I wrote about women's health, sexism in the media, cultural imagery. I even wrote about women (other women) with eating disorders. And quietly, privately, I starved myself half to death. There you have it: intellectual belief without the correlary of emotional roots; feminist power understood in the mind but not known, somehow, in the body.

If only we lived in a culture in which internal measures of satisfaction and success — a capacity for joy and caring, an ability to laugh, a sense of connection to others, a belief in social justice — were as highly valued as external measures. If only we lived in a culture that made ambition compatible with motherhood and family life, that presented models of women who were integrated and whole: strong, sexual, ambitious, cued into their own varied appetites and demands, and equipped with the freedom and resources to explore all of them. If only women felt less isolated in their frustration and fatigue, less torn between competing hungers, less compelled to keep nine balls in the air at once, and less prone to blame themselves when those balls come crashing to the floor. If only we exercised our own power, which is considerable but woefully underused; if only we defined desire on our own terms. And — painfully, truly — if only we didn't care so much about how we looked, how much we weighed, what we wore.

time I wanted to explain the perils of growing

I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often.

But isn’t this what Americans do best, the pursuit of happiness reconfigured as the pursuit of stuff, the diet, the toys, the boys, the magic bullet

One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober--if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them--you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life.

Liquor creates delusion. It can make your life feel full of risk and adventure, sparkling and dynamic as a rough sea under sunlight. A single drink can make you feel unstoppable, masterful, capable of solving problems that overwhelmed you just five minutes before. In fact, the opposite is true: drinking brings your life to a standstill, makes it static as rock over time.

Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? And why are they so difficult to find, particularly for women?

and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It’s a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

Of course, active alcoholics love hearing about the worst cases; we cling to stories about them. Those are the true alcoholics: the unstable and the lunatic; the bum in the subway drinking from the bottle; the red-faced salesman slugging it down in a cheap hotel. Those alcoholics are always a good ten or twenty steps farther down the line than we are, and no matter how many private pangs of worry we harbor about our own drinking, they always serve to remind us that we’re okay, safe, in sufficient control. Growing up, whatever vague definition of alcoholism I had centered around the crazy ones—Eliza’s mother, Lauren’s father’s ex-wife, the occasional drunken parent of a friend. Alcoholics like that make you feel so much better: you can look at them and think, But my family wasn’t crazy; I’m not like that; I must be safe. When you’re drinking, the dividing line between you and real trouble always manages to fall just past where you stand.

Drinking alone is what you do when you can’t stand the feeling of living in your own skin. Boswell describes this in his Life of Johnson: “I drink alone,” Johnson explains, “to get rid of myself, to send myself away. Wine makes a man better pleased with himself.

The freedom to choose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

...lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog's mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it's not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog...but cruel.

The one imperfect aspect of this near-perfect relationship, our bond with dogs, is its lack of longevity. They live such brief lives, and if there’s one thing that intensifies the sense of loss we experience when they die, it’s the fact that our grief tends to be pathologized, considered excessive and misdirected, even silly.

Of course, there is no simple answer. Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It’s too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you’re both aware and unaware of it almost all the time; all you know is you’d die without it,

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way. Life without Lucille? Unfathomable, to contemplate how quiet and still my home would be, and how much less laughter there'd be, and how unanchored I'd feel without her presence, the simple constancy of it.

is that in some deep and important personal respects you stop growing when you start drinking alcoholically. The drink stunts you, prevents you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale. When you drink in order to transform yourself, when you drink and become someone you’re not, when you do this over and over and over, your relationship to the world becomes muddied and unclear. You lose your bearings, the ground underneath you begins to feel shaky. After a while you don’t know even the most basic things about yourself—what you’re afraid of, what feels good and bad, what you need in order to feel comforted and calm—because you’ve never given yourself a chance, a clear, sober chance, to find out.

These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake —add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem — and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow... The experience of appetite in this equation is an experience of anxiety, a burden and a risk; yielding to hunger may be permissible under certain conditions, but mostly it's something to be Earned or Monitored and Controlled.

What makes you feel empty and what makes you feel full? Who, or what, makes you feel connected or soothed or joyful? How much companionship do you need, and how much solitude? What feels right, what feels like enough? We all have to feel our way through those questions in life, and although she cannot provide the answers for me, I have the sense that Lucille is gently leading me toward them. I pick up that leash; I go forward.

That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women’s lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women’s troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite—specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it’s submerged and rerouted—is the thread that binds them together. One woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another’s maxed-out MasterCard; one woman’s soul-murdering love affair is another’s frenzied eating binge.

I once heard a woman who'd lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy.

Az alkoholizmus bizonyos értelemben e kereséseszmény huszadik század végi tökéletes megfogalmazása, különösen erőteljes kifejezése annak, amire sokunkat megtanítottak: hogy konfrontálódjunk a mélyről jövő vágyainkkal. Töltsd fel, töltsd fel, töltsd fel. Töltsd fel az ürességet, töltsd fel a magány, a rettegés, a düh gödrét; könyörgöm, vidd el, de azonnal. Társadalmunk tökélyre vitte az egyszerű - vagy látszólag egyszerű - megoldásokat erre a késztetésre: elég tévét nézni, és a válaszok maguktól jönnek; a kívánt testsúly majd megoldja a problémát. Vagy a megfelelő ház. Néhány sör.

The fact is, nobody would have known from looking. An outsider walking past my cubicle that morning would have seen a petite woman of thirty-four with long, light brown hair pulled back in a barrette, neat and orderly-looking. Closer inspection would have suggested a perfectionistic, polished exterior, a careful attention to detail: a young woman with well-manicured nails and black leggings and Italian shoes; a daily list of things to do sitting on the desk, written in perfect print, several items already neatly ticked off; a workspace so compulsively tidy that one of my staff writers used to say you could fly a plane over my desk and it would look like a map of the Midwest, everything at perfect right angles. Colleagues saw me as smart and introspective, a little reserved maybe, and a paragon of efficiency at work: organized, professional, productive.

Many of us drink in order to take that flight, in order to pour ourselves, literally, into new personalities: uncap the bottle, pop the cork, slide into someone else’s skin. A liquid makeover, from the inside out. Everywhere we look, we are told that this is possible; the knowledge creeps inside us and settles in dark corners, places where fantasies lie. We see it on billboards, in glossy magazine ads, in movies and on TV: we see couples huddled together by fires, sipping brandy, flames reflecting in the gleam of glass snifters; we see elegant groups raising celebratory glasses of wine in restaurants; we see friendships cemented over barstools and dark bottles of beer. We see secrets shared, problems solved, romances bloom. We watch, we know, and together the wine, beer, and liquor industries spend more than $1 billion each year*2 reinforcing this knowledge: drinking will transform us.

Vicky grew up the way I did, in the era of the yard dog. “We didn’t have dogs hanging around inside with us all day,” she says. “They pretty much lived outside. My mom let the dogs out in the morning, and they hung out in the yard all day, or someone left a gate open and they went roaming around the neighborhood until dinnertime. Sometimes the cops would call and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got your dog,’ and he’d be, like, in another town. We didn’t have leash laws. We didn’t really have to think about exercising the dog. We didn’t have to think about training the dog, for that matter. The dogs were just—you know, there.

tend to side with the Monks of New Skete on the question of the canine desire to please: dogs, they say, care a lot less about pleasing humans than they care about pleasing themselves; if acting in a way that pleases you means something good will happen to them—they’ll get a biscuit, a reward, a pat on the back—they’re likely to be motivated to carry out the task, but their agenda is not necessarily driven by the pure and selfless wish to make you happy.

Sobriety is less about “getting better” in a clear, linear sense than it is about subjecting yourself to change, to the inevitable ups and downs, fears and feelings, victories and failures, that accompany growth. You do get better—or at least you can— but that happens almost by default, by the simple fact of being present in your own life, of being aware and able, finally, to act on the connections you make.

Not long ago I heard a woman in her ninth month of sobriety say that before she quit drinking, she had only two emotions, anxiety and despair. “Now I have, like, too many to count,” she said, “and some of them suck, but some of them are really, really good.” Almost everyone in the room knew what she meant.

In my view, dogs can be shamanistic, can be heroic and gentle and wise and enormously healing, but for the most part dogs are dogs, creatures governed by their own biological imperatives and codes of conduct, and we do both them and our relationships with them a disservice when we romanticize them.

One woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another’s maxed-out MasterCard; one woman’s soul-murdering love affair is another’s frenzied eating binge. The methods may differ, but boil any of these behaviors down to their essential ingredients and you are likely find a particularly female blend of anxiety, guilt, shame, and sorrow, the psychic roux of profound—and often profoundly misunderstood—hungers.

The real struggle...is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for her life to begin.

is that in some deep and important personal respects you stop growing when you start drinking alcoholically. The drink stunts you, prevents you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale.

You’re after something deeper than a respite from shyness, or a break from private fears and anger. So after a while you alter the equation, make it stronger and more complete. Pain+Drink=Self-Obliteration.

I felt small and exposed in his presence, as though my body was transparent and fragile as air, as though I might evaporate at any moment, or blow away.

He could make you feel really special that way, singularly special, as though you were a bright light in his life and he had some key to that light, a way of accessing the things about you that were real and true.

I once heard a woman who’d lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I’d amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy.

Like so many women I know, I grew up understanding that self-worth and likeability were inextricably linked, that a sizeable portion of my value would come from nourishing others: pleasing, avoiding conflict, concealing my own needs and disappointments.

The knowledge that some people can have enough while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic’s body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic’s.

attaching all your hopes and fantasies to something—or someone—outside yourself almost always has disastrous results.

The dog-as-surrogate view implies that there are only two ways to inhabit the world, with other humans or without them, and it ignores the fact that sometimes you need both and sometimes you need a safe space somewhere in between. Dogs occupy that safe space; they make it possible.

a woman’s individual preoccupation with weight often serves as a mask for other, more intricate sources of discomfort, the state of one’s waistline being easier to contemplate than the state of one’s soul.

Loving a dog deeply does have a cellular quality, as though the most central part of you—your whole nervous system—gets tied into the bond, into the life you create together. You do get reprogrammed: a person with a dog becomes a dog person, with all the change that implies.

Feels right: music to my ears. My therapist has tried to steer me toward that feeling for eons: forget about what you think you’re supposed to do, forget about what others expect you to do; what feels right, to you?